


Zugzwang

by Jocondite (jocondite)



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-26
Updated: 2011-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jocondite/pseuds/Jocondite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Count again. I think you’re going to come up a little short of pawns, Erik," Charles said pleasantly, ignoring the way the arms of his wheelchair began to twist and warp, curling around his wrists like living hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zugzwang

**Author's Note:**

> In chess, a player whose turn it is to move who has no move that does not worsen his position is said to be in zugzwang. In game theory, it specifically means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss.

_See nothing_ , he told the clerks and the customers and the men on duty, and they looked straight ahead. _You’re not surprised to see me_ , he told the secretary sitting frozen at her desk, one hand reaching for the telephone. The door behind her was locked, but Alex took care of it with several fierce, concentrated kicks, barely pausing in his stride, and held it open for Charles as he wheeled himself through. It was foolish to rely on pyrotechnic displays of power when ordinary human talent could achieve the desired result as easily, and less dangerously; Charles had accepted several years ago that the raw strength of Alex’s power was made for the grand scale, not the laser-like focus required for such fine work as melting through a lock. Alex would carve out a doorway.

“Nicely done,” he said, as they moved along the hallway and the second door fell. They were barely past the threshold when a great gob of acid arched towards them, landing in the space where his chair had been a few seconds earlier.

 _Be still_ , he thought severely, and Angel glared at him helplessly from across the room, every muscle locked into place except the butterfly beat of her wings, still flickering in a thousand shades of blue and green and lavender, silver and gold.

He couldn’t sense any others stationed outside the vault; no one but the humans going about their business in the main building or standing by the exits with their weapons holstered, entirely oblivious to them all. The marble floor was starting to pit and scar where the acid had landed, and he wheeled carefully around it.

“Why are her wings still moving?” Alex asked, taking a hesitant step closer to her. He’d disliked Angel since the day she’d taken Shaw’s hand and Darwin had died for it, but he had a healthy fear of her, too. When nothing happened to him, he ran a gloved fingertip over the edge of one wing, fragile as Brussels lace. Her dark eyes moved the tiniest perceptible fraction, and Charles felt sudden sharp murderous desire cutting a fresh track through her smouldering resentment. “I mean, you’re in her head, you’ve put her on pause, shouldn’t she have fallen to the floor or something?”

“I’m afraid this isn’t the time to discuss psionic physics,” Charles said, and put his fingers to his temple. It was easier now that they were closer, inside the reinforced concrete walls, but the vault was lined with metal, and it blurred his perception. There were several of their kind inside, but he couldn’t tell whether or not Erik was one of them; he was a nothingness in Charles’s head, a vacuum his mind slid over and around like greased paper.

 _Havok_ , he prompted, and Alex stepped away from Angel and straightened his shoulders.

The wall burst into flame, and the metal plating beyond it began to buckle and blister.

When it fell away, Charles blinked through the smoke and the stone and plaster dust straight into Erik’s eyes, as though he’d known precisely where he was all along. Erik’s mouth was curved with what Charles could only suppose was amusement; there was no answering echo of thought, just emptiness.

“Charles,” he said. His eyes skimmed over Alex, and down to the chair, and back again. “Taking the dog out for a walk? It’s kind of you to give us your personal attention, but you’re a little understaffed for this occasion.”

“Count again. I think you’re going to come up a little short of pawns, Erik,” Charles said pleasantly, ignoring the way the arms of his wheelchair began to twist and warp, curling around his wrists like living hands. The wheels left the floor and floated over the ruined wall, and settled carefully on a clear patch of floor inside the vault.

Alex shifted, ready--

 _No. Not unless we have no other options._

Azazel was frozen where he stood, one outstretched hand stopped short mere fractions away from Riptide’s, the other curled uselessly around the wrist of a man Charles didn’t recognise, shocking red against normal freckled skin; a middle-aged man beginning to bald, his polyester shirt damp under the arms. He’d been holding onto his briefcase like it was his only anchor in a world where gravity had come undone when Charles had locked the three of them into place like Laocoon and his sons. _Freaks, monsters_ , his mind burbled, incoherent, _right there in my office and then we were here, magic, help me, oh god, help me--_

“Mm,” Erik said, the little considering murmur he used to make in the back of his throat just before castling one of Charles’ rooks and utterly upsetting his strategy. It was hard to reconcile those quiet evenings in the library with this cold man in his red and purple, the fine clockwork workings of his brilliant mind utterly hidden under the blood-cast iron of his helmet. Watching Erik sip at his Scotch and scowl at the board as the fire caught reddish glints in his smoothly brushed hair still felt infinitely more real.

The hooded woman at his elbow shifted, and when Charles pressed, he found the same slippery blankness keeping her mind out of his grasp.

“Mystique,” Erik said calmly, but when she pushed back her hood it was Raven, honey-coloured hair tangled around her shoulders and a band of steel across her pale forehead like a diadem. She gave him the tiniest of smiles, the corners of her mouth lifting uncertainly.

The sight of her hit him in a one-two punch of sudden, unthinking familiarity, and the slower arrival of cold logic on its heels. She looked exactly the same as the last time he’d seen her this way, his lovely little sister, brushing absent-mindedly against him on the stairway after dinner a few hours before she came back down the stairs naked and blue and bristling, asking for something he didn’t understand. Ten years ago.

Exactly.

“Raven,” he said, hearing the roughness in his voice. _Hold_ , he snapped when Alex reached reflexively for his plasma, and pushed his concern, Erik’s knowing smile, the frightened scratching mind of the man with the briefcase, all of it, _away._ Only for a second, but long enough.

“Hi,” she said softly, the curves of her face tender with youth, suspended in time, and her eyes slid sideways just as Azazel’s fingertips reached Riptide’s.

“Please,” the man with the briefcase whispered, and then the three of them were gone.

“Check,” Erik said, and smiled thinly. “We have what we came for, and the key to using it. It’s a pity that particular distraction won’t work again, but I think it was worth it.”

Behind them, Alex was swearing, pinned suddenly face-first and harmless to the wall by the ruined remains of the metal plating. Charles could feel his broadcast anger like a pulse in the back of his mind, _fuckfuckingassholefuckingshit_ , and tried to reach for serenity.

“It worked rather well,” he agreed tightly. “I care for my sister very much.”

“She’s not real,” Raven said, and the cream and gold girl she had been was gone. Raven had settled on the final version of that face before Charles had started university, after years of tweaking, trying on and discarding dimples and noses and Grace Kelly’s eyebrows the way other girls tried on lipsticks. She’d worn it for seven years, unchanging, before laying it aside. She stared back at him now with flat yellow eyes, the shifting mystery of her skin blue and indigo and cobalt. A tracing of scales glittered along her cheekbone.

Charles hadn’t seen her in this form for a long time, either; every time he’d come up against the Brotherhood in person, which had been rare in the first few years after his accident, she’d been wearing someone else’s face, the occasional flash of gold behind their eyes the only clue. She looked lean and dangerous now, and as taut with stored tension as a bowstring. A weapon, everything extraneous to her sense of purpose burned away down to the essentials, the secret firebrand core that Erik had found in the obscuring layers of self-consciousness and misery that Charles had assumed with his own youthful pomposity was the normal petulance of young women.

“I’m looking at her,” he said gently. “It will always be true.”

Something changed in her face, and then the air beside her was alive, and Azazel had taken her hand, and was reaching for Erik.

Charles slid back into his mind. There was no point to freezing him again; that poor man and whatever he’d been carrying in his case were well beyond his reach. Instead, he skimmed lightning-fast through as much as he could of Azazel’s head, scooping up half-formed thoughts from the surface –

“A moment,” Erik said, stepping out of reach.

Raven glanced at him, and then at Charles, her face unreadable, and then she and Azazel were gone.

He was alone with Erik in the vault, and in the room beyond them Alex struggled in his metal straitjacket and Angel fluttered vainly in the air. They stared at each other for a moment. There had been more than a few of these meetings, over the years. Erik’s ridiculous helmet obscured too much of his face, as well as his hair, and his mind. It came down over the bridge of his nose like a medieval helm, covering the frown that nevertheless telegraphed itself in the creases around his eyes that had deepened over the decade.

“I do hope you’re going to fix these before you go,” Charles said, taking a breath, and glancing at the metal around his wrists. “These chairs cost rather a surprising amount of money.”

Erik bared his teeth in what wasn't at all a smile. “Do you understand that I could kill you right now, if I decided your annoyance factor was stronger than my regard for mutant life, and you couldn’t stop me? I could take any one of a thousand pieces of metal in this room and cut you to ribbons.”

“True,” Charles agreed, unconcerned. “Go ahead.” He gave Erik his most serene smile. He couldn’t get into his head, but he could get under his skin.

“Stop thinking I’m some sort of harmless altruist,” Erik said, and his voice went very low and very cold, the way Shaw had heard it just before he died. “If you keep showing up with inadequate back-up and a wholly mistaken belief that I’m some sort of housetrained puppy, you will get hurt.”

“I’ve seen the end of too many of the non-mutant lives you don’t particularly value to think that,” Charles said crisply, and they stared at each other a moment longer. “And while you wear that, I’m as helpless with you as one of them would be. I put myself in your hands, Erik, and _I_ am unafraid.” He lifted his eyes deliberately to the helmet, and watched Erik’s mouth twist.

A moment later the metal around his wrists loosened and uncoiled, trying to bend itself back into its original form.

“You’ve always had this terrible penchant for stalemate,” Erik said, his tone quite disinterested. “Let Angel go, and I’ll release Havok before I leave.”

“Gladly,” Charles said. He gave her back the use of her body, and a few murmured instructions, and in a moment they heard the frantic beat of her wings.

She hovered angry and restless at Erik’s side, like a bee trapped inside a glass jar, and he took her hand in a gesture that was almost soothing. Her wings slowed, and when her feet reached the floor they folded back and sheathed themselves in her skin. The basilisk look she turned on Charles was sibling to the one she’d given the two of them so long ago, when they’d taken her into the champagne room and she’d stood there in her scanty clothes, hands on her hips; and entirely alien from the look of sudden, transcendent warmth she’d worn when they’d told her she was one of theirs, and they were all leaving together.

“Until our next game,” Erik said dryly, and when Azazel appeared, wary-eyed, he put his hand on his shoulder. There was the sudden wrench of metal and the sound of Alex dropping heavily to his knees, and then Charles was quite alone within the vault.

There was work to be done. He could hardly leave Hank in charge of the school for long, and he had caught flashes of things from Azazel and the man they’d taken that didn’t quite fit together yet, but would; a few hints at a location, at their current purpose. For a moment, though, he rubbed the back of his thumb over the stripe of flesh where the metal had curled around his wrists with terrible gentleness, as warm as human skin.


End file.
